1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to disk fault prediction techniques for storage devices and, more particularly, relates to a driver which enables a Windows 95 application to access an IDE device such that disk fault prediction operations may be performed.
2. Description of Related Art
The vast majority of personal computer (or "PC") systems available today come equipped with a peripheral storage device such as a hard disk drive. These storage devices, commonly referred to as ATA or IDE disk drives, have become an essential part of PC systems.
While quite reliable, ATA disk drives will occasionally fail. As a result, the associated PC system will be down while the ATA disk drive is replaced. Additionally, the drive failure may cause the loss of some or all of the data stored on the ATA disk drive. While much of the data stored on a failed drive is recoverable, the recovery of such data may prove both costly and time consuming. Thus, unless the ATA disk drive was backed up immediately prior to the drive failure, the cost of an unscheduled failure of a disk drive may be great.
There are two general classes of failures that can occur in ATA disk drives. The first class is the "on/off" type of failure which causes the drive to quickly and unpredictably fail. The drive failure prediction techniques disclosed herein are not expected to be able to predict "on/off" failures of ATA disk drives. The second class of failures result due to the gradual decay of electrical and/or mechanical components within the ATA disk drive. It is hoped that the drive failure prediction techniques disclosed herein will be able to predict 20% of these "gradual" failures of ATA disk drives.
As disclosed herein, drive failure prediction (also known as "disk fault prediction" or "DFP") is a technique by which the operation of a disk drive is monitored, preferably, by monitoring key disk drive attributes, and analyzed such that the user may be notified of potential drive failures before they occur. By providing advance warning of a drive failure, the user may schedule the computer for drive replacement, thereby avoiding the unplanned interruptions and potential data loss caused by a drive failure.
While certain aspects of disk fault prediction have been incorporated into complex computer management systems generally characterized by plural instrumentation agents for querying manageable devices to collect object data, an associated enterprise management information base for storing the collected object data in accordance with a specified MIB architecture and a graphical user interface for managing the manageable devices using the enterprise MIB, generally, disk fault prediction has remained unavailable on smaller systems. As part of the gradual development of intelligent manageability for desktop computers, the incorporation of disk fault prediction techniques into desktop computers and small networks has become increasingly important.
In U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/404,812 filed Mar. 13, 1995, a method for predicting potential failures of storage devices such as ATA disk drives was disclosed. However, in that application, it was presumed that the CPU which performed the disclosed drive failure prediction techniques could directly access the ATA storage device for which drive failure prediction was desired. More specifically, in order to implement drive failure prediction techniques, access to the disk controller for the storage device is required. However, such access is not available in many operating computer systems, most notably, Microsoft's "Windows 95" operating system which is presently expected to become commercially available in August, 1995. Without such access, disk fault prediction cannot be provided for computer systems using the Windows 95 operating system.
Thus, it can be readily seen from the foregoing that it would be desirable to provide a disk driver for accessing an IDE drive such that disk fault prediction operations may be performed using a Windows 95 application. It is, therefore, the object of this invention to provide such a disk driver.